A Naked-Eye Comet for the New Year!

A Naked-Eye Comet for the New Year!

Bright Comet Lovejoy Rings in the New Year!

Comet Lovejoy is already showing off in the night sky. Click to encomanate.

Photo by Gerald Rehmann, used by permission

2014 hasn’t even ended yet and we already have one of the best comets of 2015 showing off in our skies: C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), already visible to the naked eye and predicted to get brighter over the next couple of weeks!

As a bonus, it’s passing near the constellation of Orion, making it easier to find, and it’ll also glide past Taurus and the Pleiades, providing for what should be some pretty photogenic scenes. It’s moving roughly north, so it gets higher all the time for Northern Hemisphere observers.

I went out on the evening of Dec. 28 to take a look (in between snowstorms here in Colorado) and found it easily using my trusty 10x50 binoculars, not far from Rigel, the blue star marking Orion’s left foot. With my larger 15x70s (Celestron’s SkyMaster binocs, before you ask) I could see the tail, too, despite looking through city lights in that direction, plus having a first quarter Moon illuminating the sky. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t take any pictures, but the temperature was hovering near -15° C, so I’m willing to forgive myself.

At (literally) the same time I was gawking at the comet, Roger Clark was taking this photo of it a few dozen kilometers south of me in Denver. Note the globular cluster M79 just above the comet, which was too faint for me to see with my binoculars. This is a crop; click to see the whole thing.

As for the physical nature of the comet itself, it’s on a pretty long-period orbit, taking about 14,000 years to go around the Sun.* The orbit takes it out to a distance of nearly 90 billion kilometers (for comparison, Neptune orbits at a distance of 4.5 billion kilometers). So Lovejoy got its start way the heck out in the solar system. The orbit is also wildly tilted to the plane of the solar system; it’s tipped by 80° to the paths the planets take. That’s why it’s getting so much better to see for northern observers; it’s heading up and out of the ecliptic (the line on the sky marking the path of the Sun, which is close to the plane of the solar system; we see it edge-on so it looks like a line). This may not be the first time this comet has headed into our neighborhood, but it’s a good bet it’s the last any of us will get to see it.

In other words: Here’s your chance. Take it.

*Correction, Dec. 30, 2014: The comet's orbit is 14,000 years long, not 40,000 as I originally wrote.